Radio Times
type: channel
link: https://www.radiotimes.com
date: 2025-02-27T13:48:35.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: From the archive: The genius of Gene
items: The best fictional film US presidents
items: Children's Film Foundation Bumper Box Vol 2 review - "A valuable treasure trove of innocence"
items: Andrew Collins on working with Clive James: "To collaborate with him was like winning a competition"
items: The Great Hack review: a terrifying exposé of information mining
items: The Cure: Anniversary 1978-2018 Live in Hyde Park London – review
items: Murder Mystery Netflix review: "Sandler and Aniston bring freewheeling energy to a caricatured caper"
items: These are the greatest TV theme tunes of all time – but which is your favourite?
items: Triple Frontier – Netflix movie review: "swaps narrative nuance for generic action"
items: The Highwaymen – Netflix movie review: another side to the ballad of Bonnie and Clyde
items: High Flying Bird – Netflix movie review: Soderbergh's got game
items: "It was an awkward, stressful few months": Simon Mayo reveals what went wrong at BBC Radio 2
items: If Beale Street Could Talk review: "an achingly romantic but hard-centred slice of life"
items: Which Sherlock Got Your Vote?
items: Springsteen on Broadway – Netflix movie review: An intimate night in with the Boss
items: Colette review: “a thoughtful and relevant period drama”
items: Vote for your favourite screen Sherlock Holmes
items: The American Meme – Netflix movie review: The dark side of social media
items: They Shall Not Grow Old review: "a memorial that resonates like no other documentary"
items: Private Life – Netflix movie review: "a warmly melancholic, empathic film"
items: The Kissing Booth – Netflix movie review: "slapstick, social embarrassment and a secret affair"
items: The Angel – Netflix movie review: "a brief history lesson that’s stranger than fiction"
items: Hold the Dark – Netflix movie review: "tense human interaction and corporeal violence"
items: The Land of Steady Habits – Netflix movie review: "a well-observed satire of middle-class ennui"
items: Glenn Close: I've got no regrets – except for the 'bunny boiler' scene in Fatal Attraction
items: Lucky movie: the perfect swan song for cult star Harry Dean Stanton
items: Yardie's Aml Ameen: 'I had to leave The Bill to get my career back on track'
items: Yardie review: “Idris Elba’s directorial debut feels richly authentic”
items: Meet Endeavour writer Russell Lewis: a real man of mystery
items: What We Started review: "a decent, comprehensive account of dance music's evolution"

From the archive: The genius of Gene
type: item
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: App
subject: App features
description: In the wake of Gene Hackman's death at the age of 95, revisit this 2009 tribute from former film editor Andrew Collins, after the actor's retirement.
encoded: This article was originally published in RT in June 2009. Add The Royal Tenenbaums to your watchlist. As a teenager, I designated Gene Hackman my favourite actor, in the same way that you might elevate a footballer or a pop star. I had always been movie mad and Hackman appealed to me at first sight, with his tough, marine’s build and no-nonsense demeanour, always offset with a certain twinkle in those squinty eyes. Long, long before the internet, I had to seek out information on him from magazines and books. Once home video arrived, I filled in the gaps in his CV with gusto, renting a lot of substandard fare — the Foreign Legion potboiler March or Die and western Bite the Bullet were lowlights — but as long as Hackman was in it, I’d see it through to the end. I vividly remember celebrating his 51st birthday on 30 January 1981 (I think this was a solitary affair). He seemed old then, but little did I know that he would enter a genuine renaissance in his 60s, with Unforgiven, Crimson Tide and Twilight. In The Royal Tenenbaums, Hackman gave a career-best performance, aged 70, and my unconditional teenage devotion was paid back in spades. In this whimsical, New York-set family drama from writer/director Wes Anderson, he plays the titular roguish patriarch, estranged from his brood of unhappy child prodigies and keen to build bridges with them and his wife, Anjelica Huston, before he dies of cancer — although his illness is an invention manufactured to gain sympathy. His children are played by Ben Stiller (a property speculating genius), Gwyneth Paltrow (a tortured writer married to remote psychologist Bill Murray) and Luke Wilson (a lovesick tennis champion). They live in the family’s big house, essentially in a world of their own — the television series Arrested Development always reminds me of the Tenenbaums. As with all of Anderson’s work, there is an unreal, nursery rhyme quality to the story (Alec Baldwin narrates from a book), and always a danger that connection w…

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The best fictional film US presidents
type: item
date: 2021-07-04T05:00:00.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Movies
description: Radio Times' film editor Andrew Collins lists his favourite leaders of the silver screen.
encoded: The term Independence Day may conjure up images of Roland Emmerich's iconic destruction of the White House in the 1996 film for many, but for those in the States, it also means a day of fireworks, fairs and family celebrations. However, both not only share a sense of spectacle, but an inextricable link to presidents, with Bill Pullman's Thomas J Whitmore delivering one of the greatest speeches in movie history during the landmark disaster movie. So as the 4th July holiday rolls around once again, we're celebrating the very best movie presidents to ever grace the silver screen, as chosen by Radio Times film editor Andrew Collins. They range from subdued statesmen to full-on action heroes - though are perhaps not as far-fetched as some real-life POTUSes - here are the 11 best fictional presidents from the movies, in the order in which we first saw them in the cinema. For the latest news and expert tips on getting the best deals this year, take a look at our Black Friday 2021 and Cyber Monday 2021 guides. 1. President Merkin Muffley Peter Sellers in Dr Strangelove... (1963) Every world leader’s worst nightmare, an accidental nuclear endgame with Russia, drives Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy, in which Sellers plays blandly smooth Muffley, negotiating by phone with the Soviet premier from the Pentagon bunker, as if dividing the bill at the golf club. Sellers based him on Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, UN Ambassador during the very real Cuban missile crisis. And it’s Muffley who delivers the explosive line, “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!” 2. The President (unnamed) EG Marshall in Superman II (1980) View oEmbed on the source website The first Superman sequel involves three Kryptonian criminals in black, Aladdin-style attire – led by General Zod (Terence Stamp) – unexpectedly freed from the Phantom Zone by an H-bomb exploding in space. Bulletproof, they storm the White House and demand Earth’s surrender. A decoy president prepares to “kneel b…

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Children's Film Foundation Bumper Box Vol 2 review - "A valuable treasure trove of innocence"
type: item
date: 2020-03-30T13:29:46.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Movies
subject: Family
description: An assortment of children's classics are now available to share with the next generation
encoded: It’s understandable that a wistful air of nostalgia might have taken hold during the escalating Coronavirus crisis – to a Prelapsarian time when things were simpler, events less instantly global and the stakes much lower. If you, too, hanker for the past, I have the answer – the Children’s Film Foundation Bumper Box Vol. 2, a physical product (remember those?) and three-disc set from the BFI that collects films made, on location, initially in black-and-white, and laser-aimed at the young. Mention of the CFF – founded in 1951 as a non-profit and subsidised by a levy on UK box office receipts – will get the nostalgia glands working overtime for Generation X-ers like myself, born into a less tricky world (certainly for kids) before computers, interconnectivity and selfies. Our parents had no choice but to let us run free, having first warned us not to fly kits near electricity pylons. Saturday Morning Picture shows started up here after the war, with local cinemas showing imported American serials, Daffy Duck cartoons and something daft starring Will Hay. This is where the CFF showcased its wholesome adventures, where the baddie was always a grown-up and justice was served. My memory of ABC Minors, as the cinema chain christened its junior patrons, was one of happy chaos. It’s only now that former beneficiaries of subsidized cinema for kids realise how lucky we were. As the new CFF set confirms, there’s joy in these hour-long films, the best of which were produced in the 60s and 70s when bombsites were still seen in rebuilt towns, and dens were vital for the self-respecting gang. (There were no postcode skirmishes in those days.) Many future TV stars earned their spurs in films like 1963’s Seventy Deadly Pills – a Bash Street-style caper in which drugs are mistaken for Smarties – with future Railway Children and Man About the House star Sally Thomsett and not-yet-Alf-Garnett Warren Mitchell. Other CFF graduates included Denis Waterman, with the likes of Dad’s Army’s Ar…

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Andrew Collins on working with Clive James: "To collaborate with him was like winning a competition"
type: item
date: 2019-11-28T09:53:17.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Comedy
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The Radio Times Film Editor remembers the disarmingly charming broadcaster
encoded: In 1679, the last Dodo was killed in Mauritius by British sailors. A Navy spokesman said, “It’s regrettable, but these lads have got to let off steam when they go into town at the weekend and believe me, some of these birds are no angels, you know.” Is that funny? I hope so. It was one of pages and pages of history-themed gags that erstwhile Radio Times contributor Stuart Maconie and I churned out for Clive James, whose loss will be deeply felt by those who knew him and those who felt they knew him from his amiably well-read presence on ITV, as well as eruditely funny memoirs and, lately, reviews of box sets. Clive James dies aged 80 Stuart and I were known as “the boys” around the offices of Clive’s production company Watchmaker, hired to write the bulk of the great man’s gags on a three-hour satirical review of the last thousand years for New Year’s Eve 1999. A polymath who was at the time learning Japanese so that he could fully appreciate Japanese poetry, and who considered the tango a matter of life and death, he was convinced by his business partner Richard and producer Elaine that even he couldn’t possibly write a three-hour show on his own. He was magnanimous enough to laugh at the jokes of two ex-music-press hacks who fancied themselves as comedy writers. When he laughed his eyes disappeared even further back into his famous head. It was disarming to see him ambling around the office, smaller and craggier than TV portrayed him, open-necked, usually in shirtsleeves, sometimes in what can only be described as a gardening jumper. We loved Clive James. To work with him – to collaborate, breathe the same showbiz air – was like winning a competition. When we first met him, he leaned in, proffered his hand, turned on that Clive James twinkle, and said, in fluent showbiz, "Thank you for being you." "OK," he would say. "Let’s see what the next batch of archive throws up. I’m going to take a break. Boys, do you want to come to my office in an hour and we’ll work on t…

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The Great Hack review: a terrifying exposé of information mining
type: item
date: 2019-07-24T12:06:15.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Documentaries
subject: Movies
subject: News
subject: TV
description: In an era when data is king, this documentary will make you think twice about clicking away your personal details
encoded: The Great Hack is a terrifying documentary about the new threat of information mining. It leads with the fact that data is now the world’s most valuable commodity – bigger than oil – in a new era of digital "disruption" and data misuse. This caffeinated crusade starts with an animated vision of zillions of online posts fizzing upwards from our screens, before settling into more familiar, back-of-a-cab campaigning mode. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> Among the featured subjects is approachable but obsessive New York design school professor David Carroll, a man on a quest to acquire his own data. His journey takes him to London and Cambridge Analytica – the consultancy closed down in 2018 after a scandal involving unsuspecting Facebook users having their data harvested and then used for political gain. This fastidiously partisan account, directed by Oscar-nominated Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim (The Square), relies heavily on us-versus-them testimony and conjures its own version of project fear. It falters only in terms of the sketchiness of its star whistleblower, former Cambridge Analytica business development director Brittany Kaiser, a social media-savvy human rights lobbyist turned Republican jet-setter whose inside info helps lay the insidious system bare. The Great Hack has a limited release in cinemas and is available on Netflix View oEmbed on the source website

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The Cure: Anniversary 1978-2018 Live in Hyde Park London – review
type: item
date: 2019-07-08T15:08:01.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Documentaries
subject: Movies
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Hot hot hot on the heels of their Glastonbury headlining set, a chance to relive the Cure's 40th birthday celebration on the big screen
encoded: Having been formed by suburban teen punk Robert Smith in Crawley, West Sussex, in 1978, prevailing goth-rock legends the Cure marked their 40th anniversary with a show in London's Hyde Park. Did you spot the Doctor Who Easter egg on stage with the Cure at Glastonbury? This pristine, few-frills widescreen account by the group’s loyal chronicler and promo director Tim Pope captures them in fine musical form and bathed in caramel sunlight. The daytime start is somewhat at odds with the Cure’s dark, growling brand of whistleable existential doubt, although you’re never far away from an upbeat hit like Friday I’m in Love, Close to Me or Boys Don’t Cry between the powerfully morose, synth-driven workouts that typify their back catalogue. View oEmbed on the source website Delight darts across the faces of the band members – crow-like bassist Simon Gallup, raffish keyboardist Roger O’Donnell, hard-working drummer Jason Cooper and guitarist Reeves Gabrels, the former Bowie sideman who replaced Porl "Pearl" Thompson in 2012 – but Smith remains the focus, comfortably tubby and grey of thatch, but oddly mesmeric in his self-hugging awkwardness. The biggest movie releases of 2019 Playing a longer set than their subsequent two-hour 2019 Glastonbury headlining slot, this surely puts the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame-inducted Cure in that same legendary bracket as a twilight-years Rolling Stones-in-waiting. The Cure: Anniversary 1978-2018 Live in Hyde Park London arrives in cinemas on Thursday 11 July

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Murder Mystery Netflix review: "Sandler and Aniston bring freewheeling energy to a caricatured caper"
type: item
date: 2019-06-20T08:47:58.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Comedy
subject: News
subject: TV
subject: Netflix
subject: On demand
description: Adam and Jen play the brash American couple who embark on a dream holiday to Europe, only to become caught up in a billion-dollar bloodbath
encoded: The classic husband-and-wife sleuth team was Nick and Nora Charles — popularised in the 1930s and 40s Thin Man film series by William Powell and Myrna Loy. Crime-cracking couples have flourished on TV since (Hart to Hart, McMillan & Wife, Castle), but this Netflix-funded revival is more like Manhattan Murder Mystery on the Med, with Adam Sandler as a promotion-shy New York cop and Jennifer Aniston as his crime-fiction-fan wife. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> In the creaking set-up of James Vanderbilt’s derivative screenplay, Aniston charms Luke Evans’s English viscount on a flight to Europe, and he invites her and Sandler to join him on his family’s superyacht. There, we are introduced to a motley parade of inheritance-chasers (David Walliams, Gemma Arterton, Adeel Akhtar among them), who hope patriarch Terence Stamp croaks before signing away his billion-dollar fortune to his young wife. The corpses mount up as our heroes fall under suspicion and learn to mend their marriage between predictable predicaments on a high ledge, under a conjugal bed, and behind the wheel on a Grand Prix circuit — all perfunctorily staged by TV director Kyle Newacheck. Sandler and Aniston bring freewheeling energy to the caricatured caper, but ultimately fail to convince us this is franchise-worthy material. Murder Mystery is on Netflix View oEmbed on the source website

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These are the greatest TV theme tunes of all time – but which is your favourite?
type: item
date: 2019-03-30T16:00:00.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: Radio
subject: TV
subject: audio
description: Radio Times and BFI have compiled a shortlist of 60 iconic tunes – now Andrew Collins wants you to pick your favourite
encoded: This weekend, my Classic FM show Saturday Night at the Movies will be devoted not to the sweeping suites and symphonies of the silver screen but the signature tunes that serenade the credits on the small screen. Arguably more musically experimental – consider the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s squelching synth treatments of Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who opener from 1963 – TV works our nostalgia glands in more direct form. Just think of galloping teatime favourite Black Beauty by Denis King, Barrington Pheloung’s melancholy distress signal for Inspector Morse, or Michael Price and David Arnold’s timeless refrains for Sherlock. What is Britain's greatest TV theme tune? VOTE NOW Few programmes risk getting underway without the gear-change of an identifying musical signature, even those cool, US-influenced dramas that esoterically begin with what’s called a “cold open” – a pre-credits teaser to set the scene before a theme accompanies the dissolving roll-call of actors and crew. This deferment means a show isn’t really on the road until what Little Britain’s Denis Waterman called the “feem tune”. Some hum-along openers spawn chart-topping monsters, such as the Eye Level theme from 70s ITV crime-solver Van der Valk (a UK number one for the Simon Park Orchestra) or reality pioneer Big Brother (number 4 in its first series in 2000 for the DJ duo Elementfour). View oEmbed on the source website There’s a bottomless archive via YouTube and others, just waiting to be piped into your ears to provide a joyfully Pavlovian response. Which is why we’re launching the search for the nation’s favourite TV theme based on a shortlist of 60 drawn up with the BFI. The credits sequence has evolved unrecognisably since the glowing police lamp at the start of Dixon of Dock Green in 1955 and its melancholy harmonica rendition of Jeff Darnell’s blues. The introduction of colour was epitomised by the titles of 70s school sitcom Please Sir!, whose credits were graffiti-ed across a bright orange wall to t…

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Triple Frontier – Netflix movie review: "swaps narrative nuance for generic action"
type: item
date: 2019-03-15T14:55:33.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Movies
subject: News
description: Ben Affleck and Oscar Isaac plan a daring raid on a narcotics kingpin in this testosterone-heavy heist movie from JC Chandor
encoded: ★★ Director JC Chandor specialises in male crises, whether in high finance (Margin Call) or on a stricken yacht (All Is Lost). But this South American-set escape thriller, co-written with Zero Dark Thirty’s Mark Boal, swaps narrative nuance for generic action, as an all-purpose, testosterone-pumped raid on the jungle hideaway of a narcotics kingpin by five mercenaries morphs into an epic test of endurance in the style of The Way Back. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> There are hints, too, of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, as suave leader Oscar Isaac, reckless Charlie Hunnam, depressed Ben Affleck, cowboy Garrett Hedlund and quiet Pedro Pascal (Narcos) partially bungle a Robin Hood-style heist through their own greed. While earthily enough shot in Colombia and Hawaii, the story strains as much as the seams of the gym-bulked squad’s vests. There are enjoyable moments, such as when the cash burdens the team's escape through cocaine plantations and eventually over the Andes, where a bonfire of banknotes keeps them warm. But it all boils back down to manly hugs, combat codenames ("Catfish", "Pope") and "full-on cowboy s**t". Uniquely for Chandor, we’ve seen it all before. Triple Frontier is on Netflix View oEmbed on the source website

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The Highwaymen – Netflix movie review: another side to the ballad of Bonnie and Clyde
type: item
date: 2019-03-12T12:56:29.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Movies
subject: News
description: Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson play the lawmen who brought down the Depression-era outlaws in this handsome drama
encoded: ★★★★ Director of the 2004 retelling of The Alamo, John Lee Hancock, and Young Guns screenwriter John Fusco replay the ballad of Bonnie and Clyde from the point of view of the two retired Texas Rangers who, on 23 May 1934, ended the pair’s deadly crime spree in a hail of bullets. Paunchy Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner) and his recovering alcoholic partner Manny Gault (Woody Harrelson) are Depression-era equivalents of the two minor characters in Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (which demoted Hamlet to a cameo). Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are similarly sidelined here, glimpsed in long shot or a close-up of Bonnie’s heels. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> It’s an original if predominantly talky approach, handsomely staged in Louisiana, with a light piano score from Thomas Newman and an ear for the times ("Jiminy Christmas!" exclaims a pious Costner). Although more male-oriented than Arthur Penn’s 1967 account (Kathy Bates appears as Texas governor "Ma" Ferguson and Kim Dickens as Hamer’s wife), you’ll still cheer on our out-of-date lawmen on as they eschew wiretapping and other new-fangled novelties in favour of getting the job done the old way. Hancock turns the outlaws’ fame into a narrative device and succeeds in rescuing Hamer’s reputation after he was played as an incompetent in Penn's Bonnie and Clyde. The Highwaymen arrives on Netflix on 29 March View oEmbed on the source website

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High Flying Bird – Netflix movie review: Soderbergh's got game
type: item
date: 2019-02-20T12:23:55.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Movies
subject: News
description: Basketball players set about taking back control from the NBA in Steven Soderbergh's second iPhone-shot feature
encoded: ★★★ If you don’t follow professional basketball, Steven Soderbergh’s drama offers an intensive crash course into what’s known as a "lockout", which is when the collective-bargaining agreement between the NBA (National Basketball Association) and the Players Association collapses and games are suspended. Soderbergh and playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney (Moonlight) weave a talky, constantly fist-bumping story around a fictional moratorium that centres on persuasive agent André Holland (who originated the story), assistant Zazie Beetz (a superstar in the making), rival rep Sonja Sohn (a regular in The Wire) and hot-headed baller Melvin Gregg (TV’s UnREAL), and moves constantly between office, street, apartment, sauna and the court at a Bronx high school. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> Like previous film Unsane, Soderbergh shoots on a mobile phone – this time the iPhone 8– and its custom widescreen lens pleasingly distorts at the edges as it bends the pixels into frame, while fixed shots at tabletop or floor level are crisp and bright. Purists may feel it lacks a certain grain and renders the reality flat. And when Holland hustles his client with "Netflix wants to sit down tomorrow, only thing they don’t have is live streaming," you’ll either applaud the metatextuality in a film released by Netflix or boo the ostentatious product placement. High Flying Bird is on Netflix View oEmbed on the source website

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"It was an awkward, stressful few months": Simon Mayo reveals what went wrong at BBC Radio 2
type: item
date: 2019-02-08T08:00:02.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: audio
subject: News
subject: Radio
subject: BBC Radio 2
description: The former Drivetime presenter opens up about his ill-fated partnership with Jo Whiley, and what the future holds on new station Scala Radio
encoded: Simon Mayo has a favourite word. It’s a compound German word, but then he’s a smart fellow, with a degree in history and politics. For him, this word encapsulates everything that went wrong in 2018 and turned it into the worst year of his otherwise charmed and illustrious professional life. He reveals it over coffee and biscuits in a hotel that sits in the shadow of New Broadcasting House in London: the word is Verschlimmbesserung. “Splendidly, it means an improvement that makes things worse,” he explains. Sara Cox to become new host of BBC Radio 2’s Drivetime Simon Mayo to leave Radio 2 after 17 years Meet Bob Shennan, the man behind BBC’s The Biggest Weekend – and the overhaul of Radio 2 Not quite in full Confessions mode but keen to clear the air, the broadcaster, whose modest ambition is to be “the friend behind the mic”, is in a much happier place now than he was last May when Radio 2 management made the “improvement” of merging his popular show with another popular show, thereby poisoning both and throwing the network into turmoil. View oEmbed on the source website The nightmare began last January, when Radio 2 controller Lewis Carnie announced that Mayo’s Sony award-winning Drivetime show would in future be co-hosted with Jo Whiley, another cherished fixture, who’d be uprooted from the bright evening show she’d presented since 2011. “It was an awkward, stressful few months,” Mayo now admits, finally putting his spiky hair above the parapet. The change was belatedly intended to address the gender imbalance of daytime Radio 2, whose weekdays had been fronted exclusively by white, middle-aged men since Sarah Kennedy’s early show was pushed back to before 7am in 2010. But it was executed with a blunt instrument, and drove one of its favourite faces to resign after 36 years at the BBC. That it made things worse is not just my personal take; as soon as the new format was rolled out, angry letters from listeners started pouring in to Radio Times. People despaired th…

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If Beale Street Could Talk review: "an achingly romantic but hard-centred slice of life"
type: item
date: 2019-02-04T15:19:22.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Movies
subject: News
description: Barry Jenkins follows his Oscar-winning Moonlight with another powerful tale of the black experience in America
encoded: ★★★★★ Early editions of James Baldwin’s Harlem-set love story If Beale Street Could Talk tended towards typographical cover design, or else they were dominated by a somewhat misleadingly Hollywood-ised illustration of two sunlit young black people in love. What you might regard as the novel’s “Capulet and Capulet” romance, staged in the early 1970s, is not one that’s kept apart by warring families – although the pious religiosity of one side shows scorn to the less devout. Rather, it’s the institutional racism of everyday life, especially for young black people trying to get along, that rends its lovers – 22-year-old Fonny and 19-year-old Tish – asunder. View oEmbed on the source website In 1962, Baldwin penned a long piece for the New Yorker about the institutional barriers and social assumptions of an upbringing in predominantly African-American ghettoes. “Perhaps,” he wrote, “we were, all of us – pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children – bound together by the nature of our oppression.” Such observations, as lived through rather than purely theoretical, made him a unique chronicler, autodidact and orator for the Civil Rights era. Writer/director Barry Jenkins follows the lauded, Oscar-winning Moonlight with an achingly romantic but hard-centred slice of life. It is the false accusation by a Puerto Rican woman of rape by Fonny (Stephan James) that drives the tragedy. Opening in prison, a voiceover from Tish (KiKi Layne) proclaims, “I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass” – a reference to the partition that separates visitor from inmate in prison. Such poetry confirms this as a thematic, artistic and political cousin to Moonlight, which unfolded over three time periods. The narrative here is more straightforward, but builds a picture through flashback of a relationship that seems to offer healing power to its protagonists. Like Moonlight, this is a film of uncommon beauty (shot once more by James Laxton) and deep e…

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Which Sherlock Got Your Vote?
type: item
date: 2019-01-29T08:00:00.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Movies
subject: News
description: The results are afoot!
encoded: Back in December, we asked you to choose your favourite screen Sherlock, either from our shortlist of ten, or by suggesting your own preferred deerstalkered diagnostician. That Benedict Cumberbatch, dashingly infuriating sociopath of BBC One’s Sherlock, remained way out in front throughout — and won the day — is testament to the welly of his fanbase. It was warming to see Jeremy Brett (whose eccentric Holmes fronted Granada TV’s 41-episode 1980s/90s series) come in second. Basil Rathbone was third (and the most popular of the big-screen Holmeses), his 14 feature-length cases (ten on TCM this week) moving from the Victorian era to the 1930s and 40s. Favourites not on our original shortlist who made your top five include Robert Downey Jr in Guy Ritchie’s pair of steampunk revivals, Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes: a Game of Shadows, and Jonny Lee Miller as Benedict’s funkily contemporary rival in Elementary on Sky Living/Sky Witness. Full marks, too, if you voted for Soviet TV star Vasily Livanov or Englishman Douglas Wilmer, inaugural star of the BBC’s mid-1960s run, later replaced by Peter Cushing. Cushing and Wilmer came in at six and seven, respectively. Here's the full list of your top ten Sherlocks: 1. Benedict Cumberbatch 2. Jeremy Brett 3. Basil Rathbone 4. Robert Downey Jr 5. Jonny Lee Miller 6. Peter Cushing 7. Douglas Wilmer 8. Vasily Livanov 9. Ian McKellen 10. Robert Stephens Now vote to have your say on the greatest film theme of all time!

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Springsteen on Broadway – Netflix movie review: An intimate night in with the Boss
type: item
date: 2019-01-05T11:58:22.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
subject: Netflix
subject: On demand
description: Up close and personal in New York, Bruce revisits signature songs from a career spanning more than 40 years
encoded: ★★★★★ As a rule, concert films are functional but valuable souvenirs for fans. Occasionally, though, they record music history (Woodstock, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars) or an innovative way to stage a show (Stop Making Sense). Springsteen on Broadway is a filmed record of Bruce’s sell-out, no-bells, no-whistles residency at New York’s modest 975-seat Walter Kerr Theatre between 2017-18. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> Keen to enjoy a more intimate connection with his audience, the veteran chronicler of working-class life draws from a 40-year songbook. But this stripped-down show (guitar, piano, guest duet with wife Patti Scialfa) is as much about verbal storytelling as banging out his back catalogue. Reciting from his 2016 autobiography, "The Boss" is open and honest, gaily deconstructing his own wide-open-road mythos by confessing to an early failure to master the stick-shift of a friend’s car. Over a dozen songs emerge naturally from the autobiographical narrative, a highlight being Born in the USA reinterpreted as a tender blues song. At two-and-a-half-hours, it ought to drag; instead it builds with poetic flourishes and self-examination: "I've never seen the inside of a factory and yet it's all I've written about." He earns warm laughter when confessing to the absurdity of his legend, knocking ’em dead with the conclusion, "That's how good I am." At the end of the road, our muscular, croaky ho…

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Colette review: “a thoughtful and relevant period drama”
type: item
date: 2019-01-04T12:34:48.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Movies
subject: News
description: Keira Knightley is perfectly cast as the feminist icon in this reverent and handsome true-life story
encoded: ★★★★ A sensation during the Belle Époque in turn-of-the-century France, the literary, artistic and feminist icon Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born to be played by Keira Knightley, who’s in her willowy, defiant element in this decorously titillating account. It concentrates on the years of Colette’s marriage to the older Henry Gauthier-Villars, a publisher-about town fleshed out by a harrumphingly priapic Dominic West. He published his talented wife’s saucy stories of the fictional libertine Claudine under the nom de plume “Willy” (stop sniggering at the back), for reasons of patriarchal orthodoxy that the public wouldn’t buy books written by women. Literarily repressed, Colette refused to take her second-class status lying down, and Knightley comes into her own. View oEmbed on the source website Colette’s stories have been intermittently adapted for the screen, most notably her then-racy Claudine novels in the silent era, and more sensationally the Leslie Caron musical Gigi in 1958. The writer herself was portrayed by French actress Mathilda May in the German/French/UK co-production Becoming Colette in 1991, directed by Danny Huston and considered something of a Euro-pudding. It was written in English and spoken in pidgin English, and didn’t stint on the soft-focus sapphism. Director Wash Westmoreland (Still Alice) wrote this far more thoughtful and politically relevant version of the same period in Colette’s vibrant life with his late husband Richard Glatzer, an avowed Francophile who died in 2015, and British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, who scripted Ida and Disobedience. For all its virtue-signalling in the direction of modern sexual politics, it looks and feels every inch like a period drama from the school of Merchant Ivory. Impeccably shot by cinematographer Giles Nuttgens (Hallam Foe, Midnight’s Children), it delights in stiff collars, inky quills, chugging cars and heavy drapes, and you sense the echoing weight of footfall on oak floorboards. Even as the …

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Vote for your favourite screen Sherlock Holmes
type: item
date: 2018-12-04T13:23:46.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The game’s afoot! It’s time to choose the ideal Holmes
encoded: This week’s case is a far-from-elementary one: who is the greatest Sherlock Holmes from cinema and TV? Guinness World Records has the great detective as “the most portrayed movie character”, starting with the 30-second American silent Baffled from 1900 (shown on a single-viewer device). His latest incarnation is Will Ferrell in boisterous comedic take Holmes and Watson (in cinemas from Boxing Day). So, more than enough pipe-sucking logicians from whom to choose. To deduce the ideal Holmes, we’ve come up with a top ten in chronological order. But the final vote is yours. Read all about them, then scroll to the bottom to make your choice… John Barrymore (1922) Mr Barrymore (pictured, left), as he is listed in the credits of once-lost silent Sherlock Holmes (adapted from a play by William Gillette but based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories), gives Holmes a suavely scatty demeanour. Described in one intertitle as “a marvel at digging out things”, he takes years to pin the blame on Moriarty in this case, but he models the pipe and smoking jacket rather well along the way. Basil Rathbone (1939-46) Arguably the definitive silver-screen Sherlock, Shakespearean stage star Rathbone went a long way to hallmarking the Holmes of lore over 14 films (currently available on TCM), ranging from first film in the series and location grandstander The Hound of the Baskervilles (Mon, Wed) to chamber pieces like the train-set Terror by Night (Fri 14 Dec). With Nigel Bruce’s slow-witted, colonially inclined Watson (“Great Scott!”), little beats the duo’s clipped repartee. Christopher Lee (1962) Having played Sir Henry Baskerville opposite Peter Cushing’s Holmes in Hammer’s 1959 Hound of the Baskervilles, Lee snatched the pipe to star in dubbed black-and-white Euro-pudding Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (directed by Hammer’s Terence Fisher). He’s at home by the hearth and lankily debonair in a cape, but the production is cheap and beneath his and — as Watson — Thorley Walters’s tale…

The American Meme – Netflix movie review: The dark side of social media
type: item
date: 2018-12-01T10:54:30.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Documentaries
subject: Movies
subject: News
subject: TV
subject: Netflix
subject: On demand
description: An intimate portrait of self-made celebrities who found fame and fortune on the internet
encoded: ★★★ As this surprisingly non-judgemental documentary about social media celebrities attests, their livelihood runs on the cryptocurrency of "likes" (usually denoted by a thumbs-up symbol). Bert Marcus’s intimate portrait of half-a-dozen narcissists who self-started on Instagram, YouTube and video platform Vine (until it was disabled in 2016), is less easy to love than the producer/director’s well-received 2017 history of the DJ, What We Started. First-hand access to key players from the famous-for-being-famous netherworld introduces onanistic spoof-jock Josh Ostrovsky (aka "The Fat Jew"), aspiring character comic Brittany Furlan, Russian-born party host Kirill Bichutsky (the "Slut Whisperer") and Paris Hilton, the heiress who reinvented herself as a dog-outfits brand. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> All are trapped in a vortex of self-promotion and stunts (one throws dollars off a roof, shouting, "Let’s make it rain on Hollywood Boulevard!"), and although Hilton seems the sanest, she admits she’s minus "part of my soul". The film is ultimately rather sad: the sassy Furlan can’t get taken seriously as an actor, post-Vine, while Bichutsky, too old for wet T-shirt contests at 33, admits he’s lonely. Without labouring the point, Marcus reveals the existential emptiness at the centre of this entire, precarious new economy. After all, when Furlan hooks up with Pamela Anderson’s ex Tommy Lee, she loses 100,000 follo…

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They Shall Not Grow Old review: "a memorial that resonates like no other documentary"
type: item
date: 2018-10-16T17:02:12.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Movies
subject: News
subject: Review
description: Peter Jackson's staggering First World War documentary combines restored footage and a collage of commentary to create a truly immersive picture of a nation at war
encoded: ★★★★★ Planned to mark the centenary of the cessation of hostilities at the end of the Great War in 1918, Peter Jackson’s painstaking re-creation of the prelude, the horror and the aftermath of the First World War draws on technology nobody could have dreamed of a century ago. Silent footage has been restored, subtly colourised and converted to 3D, with a soundtrack of banter, forced marches and artillery created in post-production. The staggering result is an immersive experience in the truest sense. View oEmbed on the source website It's narrated in a collage of commentary by unnamed soldiers (each one formally credited in the end credits with regiment and rank), their voices crackling with age and their spirit undimmed. The pre-war build-up is one of patriotic duty and the sense of a national outing for young men: one volunteer compares the training and anticipation to a “holiday camp”. A string of then-underage lads cheerfully describe the dodgy methods by which they circumvented the 18-and-over requirement (one, aged 17, is sent away by a recruiting sergeant and advised to “have a birthday and come back”). Jackson is best known for visualising verdant fantasy (Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit), but here he rises to the occasion of cold, hard reality. He makes sound documentarian decisions such as presenting the opening sections in Blighty in a square frame in misty black and white, with the constant whirr of a projector, as if showing home movies. Then he dramatically drops us across the Channel and into the quagmires of France and Belgium, with the reality of mechanised trench warfare revealed in widescreen and living colour. You quickly get over the shock of seeing once-grainy monochrome newsreel tinted and rendered corporeal with the added sound of rumbling ordnance, jolly chit-chat among comrades in arms and even, during one serene interlude, the subtle clink of beer bottles during a singalong. To use the technical term for added sound effects, this is Foley of…

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Private Life – Netflix movie review: "a warmly melancholic, empathic film"
type: item
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Movies
subject: News
subject: Netflix
subject: On demand
description: Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn play a bohemian couple desperate to have a baby in this well-observed comedy drama
encoded: ★★★★ Writer/director Tamara Jenkins made her name with Slums of Beverly Hills and The Savages, both caustic comedies about families. For her latest slice of life she turns her observant attentions to a childless bohemian couple in Brooklyn, played with warm-blooded humanity and instantly credible chemistry by Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> With Hahn having put off getting pregnant to prioritise writing a feminist book, the couple fears they have missed their window when the latest round of IVF fails. Easy gags are avoided but smiles are still raised during the medical stages (such as Giamatti, in hospital gown, attempting to provide a sperm sample to a naff porn movie and getting the TV stuck on full volume), but the crux of the story is their decision to use a donor egg provided by Giamatti's super-intelligent step-niece (Kayli Carter). Droll dialogue ("We’re doing everything we can, short of kidnapping, to start a family") serves the narrative and while Jenkins gently mocks the middle-class suburban life of the couple’s in-laws (an industrial-strength leaf-blower is a particularly piquant symbol), Private Life is essentially a warmly melancholic, empathic film that holds your hand when it's most needed. Private Life is available to watch on Netflix View oEmbed on the source website

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The Kissing Booth – Netflix movie review: "slapstick, social embarrassment and a secret affair"
type: item
date: 2018-10-08T15:48:03.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Movies
subject: News
subject: Netflix
subject: On demand
description: Joey King betrays her BFF when her lifelong crush on his hunky brother develops into something a lot more
encoded: ★★★ This Netfllix original film successfully landed in the laps of its sassy-but-anxious teen demographic and became a poster film for the brave new world of direct delivery. Based on a self-published novel by Welsh teenager Beth Reekles, it's a traditional tale of platonic LA high-school besties Lee (Joel Courtney) and Elle (Joey King), whose lifelong pact is threatened by her growing crush on his toned older brother (Jacob Elordi). New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> Seasoned TV-movie director Vince Marcello has slapstick and social embarrassment down pat (Elle’s first-day-of-term skirt malfunction causes a bit of a stir) and the secret affair – shockingly consummated under the Hollywood sign – brews genuine angst and regret. A smattering of swearing, sexual references and underage drinking means it doesn't patronise its intended audience, and it refreshingly allows the female lead to be the dork, rather than some unobtainable Venus. Ironically, the school-carnival kissing booth itself is the only creaky device. The Kissing Booth is available to watch on Netflix View oEmbed on the source website

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The Angel – Netflix movie review: "a brief history lesson that’s stranger than fiction"
type: item
date: 2018-10-03T15:23:14.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Movies
subject: News
subject: Netflix
subject: On demand
description: Marwan Kenzari plays the real-life Egyptian double agent who passed secrets to Mossad
encoded: ★★★★ Based on Uri Bar-Joseph’s biography of Ashraf Marwan, The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel, this is a reasonably faithful account of the double-agent son-in-law of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who helped avert a deadly escalation of the Yom Kippur War by passing secrets to Mossad. Directed by Israeli Ariel Vromen (whose American-set thrillers include The Iceman and Criminal), it builds commendable tension as clubbable but shifty family man Marwan (Dutch actor Marwan Kenzari) insinuates himself into the inner circle of Egyptian politics, gaining the trust of Anwar Sadat (Sasson Gabay) when he replaces Nasser in 1970. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> The action is essentially built around meetings and phone calls – in offices, bars and, in one fateful instance, a car park – but The Angel moves into more conventional political thriller territory when terrorists target a passenger jet and as the countdown to invasion begins. It’s intricately plotted, seriously acted (Yorkshireman Toby Kebbell is convincing as Marwan’s Israeli handler) and serves as a brief history lesson that’s stranger than fiction. The Angel is showing on Netflix View oEmbed on the source website

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Hold the Dark – Netflix movie review: "tense human interaction and corporeal violence"
type: item
date: 2018-10-03T12:11:23.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Movies
subject: News
subject: Netflix
subject: On demand
description: There's more conflict in rural America in this thriller from Green Room director Jeremy Saulnier
encoded: ★★★ Virginian indie talent Jeremy Saulnier’s grisly thrillers (Blue Ruin, Green Room) grow in scale and budget, but lose none of their darkness. And that's literally the case for his fourth feature as director (and first for Netflix), which is set in Alaska during the winter months. The lack of light suits Saulnier and actor/screenwriter Macon Blair, and is all the better to cloak what’s actually happening. Jeffrey Wright is the retired naturalist called in by Riley Keough’s army wife to a remote, snowbound village after her six-year-old is taken by wolves. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> While the laconic expert tracks the wolfpack, hair-trigger hubby Alexander Skarsgard returns from Iraq and a parallel hunt ensues. Despite the best efforts of decent police chief James Badge Dale, Wright finds himself at the centre of age-old internecine grudges between the villagers and law enforcement. Saulnier excels at tense human interaction and corporeal, often crossbow-inflicted violence, and stages a mind-blowing, extended set piece that provides a premature climax. In its aftermath, a ritualistic demonic element never quite gels. The director has made conflict in rural American outposts his own, but needs to perhaps turn on the lights at some point. Hold the Dark is now showing on Netflix View oEmbed on the source website

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The Land of Steady Habits – Netflix movie review: "a well-observed satire of middle-class ennui"
type: item
date: 2018-10-01T15:15:49.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Movies
subject: News
subject: Netflix
subject: On demand
description: Ben Mendelsohn plays a man adrift, in this "small, sad story" from writer/director Nicole Holofcener
encoded: ★★★ New York writer/director Nicole Holofcener has built an impressively focused body of work since her 1996 debut, Walking and Talking, getting sardonically under the skin of contemporary women as they deal with sex, relationships, age and family. Her sixth film (and first for Netflix), is, uniquely for her, an adaptation of a novel (by Ted Thompson) and concerns a man. Recently divorced, prematurely retired financier Anders Harris (played with soft, hapless appeal by Ben Mendelsohn) is adrift in a new build in a well-to-do Connecticut suburb, where mechanical sexual liaisons and social events he’s not really invited to emphasise the stability he’s left behind – specifically, practical ex-wife Helene (Edie Falco, minus the sharp edges of Carmela Soprano). New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> What is essentially a well-observed satire of middle-class ennui is lent narrative weight by the fates of two young addicts: Anders and Helene’s recovering-alcoholic son Preston (Thomas Mann); and Charlie (Charlie Tahan), son of Helene’s self-medicating best friend (Elizabeth Marvel). And it's the bored Anders who intervenes, with unexpected results. Holofcener is right to call it "a sad, small story," as beyond the warm performances the constant thrum of moneyed self-indulgence occasionally palls, with the symbolically unwanted pet turtle being passed around perhaps one metaphor too many. The Land of Steady Habits is on Netf…

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Glenn Close: I've got no regrets – except for the 'bunny boiler' scene in Fatal Attraction
type: item
date: 2018-09-28T10:51:28.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Movies
subject: News
description: "They made her into a psychopath," the six-time Oscar nominee says of her character Alex Forrest
encoded: I’m playing a parlour game with Glenn Close. We were discussing acting technique and I asked if she had a secret for making herself cry. She revealed that while shooting the 2016 British zombie-apocalypse horror The Girl with All the Gifts, she challenged co-star Gemma Arterton to a crying contest, “to see who could cry the most, the fastest. Gemma won.” At which juncture, she introduced me to another acting game: “One of you thinks of a colour. Then you put an expression on your face, which is your idea of what that colour is. The other person has to guess the colour.” All right, I think, you’re the six-time Oscar nominee, three-time Tony and Emmy Award winner… “You go first.” She centres herself facially, muttering, “OK, let’s see,” then assumes a serenely meaningful expression, which she holds as if freeze-framed. View oEmbed on the source website Fatal Attraction is being turned into a TV series — but do we really need another outdated bunny boiler? New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day I gaze at her, nervously, then I make my guess. Blue? Without breaking the spell, she shakes her head. Yellow? Another shake. Now I feel bad, as it can’t be Glenn Close’s acting that’s at fault – it must be my own failure. I give in; she tells me it was white. Gamely, she pulls another face. This time I get it: black. Her guffaw resounds around the high-ceilinged Palladian meeting room at Somerset House in London. She gives me a third expression. Purple. Yes! Two out of three! I’d assumed she’d be an ice queen; in fact, she’s closer to a Play School presenter. Now 71, Close is Hollywood royalty – a theatrical dame in all but crusty honorific, and an Oscar winner in all but the detail of having had her name chiselled into the plinth of an actual statuette. (Her six nominations without a win is the most of any living actress.) Born and raised in rural Connecticut, Close grew up communally after her parents joined Moral Re-Armament, a multifaith crusade tha…

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Lucky movie: the perfect swan song for cult star Harry Dean Stanton
type: item
date: 2018-09-14T08:18:22.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Movies
subject: News
description: The beloved character actor who died last year aged 91 is at his best in this captivating new film from director John Carroll Lynch
encoded: On 23 October 2016, in Los Angeles, the inaugural Harry Dean Stanton Award went to… Harry Dean Stanton. The event was staged by the Vidiots Foundation, a tiny non-profit organisation that grew out of a boutique video rental store in Santa Monica. At this good-natured “evening of conversation and music”, director David Lynch presented his friend of many years with the award struck in his name. Stanton ambled on in his trademark crumpled jacket and work trousers and commented off-mic that he was so old he didn’t recognise the statuette was based on the torso of a naked woman. In place of an acceptance speech, he quoted The Tempest: “Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air.” Stanton died a year ago at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on 15 September, aged 91, hailed in all quarters and described in a warm obituary in the New York Times as “the character actor who became a star”. Autumn’s top 20 dramas – introduced by their writers and creators ‘Shameless opened up all kinds of scabs in my family’: Paul Abbott on writing from life and his latest show No Offence View oEmbed on the source website It’s fitting that Stanton’s penultimate role, the first to be released posthumously, is a starring one. He plays the title character in Lucky (in cinemas and on demand from Friday 14th September), which marks the directorial debut of another reliable character actor, John Carroll Lynch. It’s a modest study of advancing age that combines comfortable routine in a one-horse Arizona town with existential doubt. The character of Lucky has much in common with Stanton himself: unmarried with no kids, both served as cooks in the US Navy during the Second World War (a faded photograph of Lucky in uniform is prominent in his shotgun shack). The two men also share an easy musicality that emerges when Lucky breaks into a captivating rendition of the tango Volver at a child’s birthday party. This took…

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Yardie's Aml Ameen: 'I had to leave The Bill to get my career back on track'
type: item
date: 2018-08-31T09:48:18.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Movies
subject: News
description: The star of Idris Elba's directorial debut Yardie talks breaking America, quitting The Bill – and why Idris should play James Bond
encoded: When I meet sizzling British star Aml Ameen in London in August, the temperature outside is 31°C. In Santa Monica, where he has lived for the past eight years, it’s a balmy 27°. In Kingston, Jamaica, where his new film Yardie was partially shot, it’s 35°. The preternaturally affable Ameen, a youthful looking 33-year-old, hit something of a career impasse when he was 25, all too common among black British actors hoping to make a living in the UK. “I took my agent aside,” he tells me, “and I said to her, ‘Listen, I’m going round and round in circles, playing the same kind of characters. I need to leave.’ She said, ‘Darling, you can’t go out to America without heat.’” In other words, without a buzz, which he didn’t yet quite have. But Ameen pressed the issue and she let him piggyback a work trip to LA with another of her clients, Nicholas Hoult, the Skins graduate then on the cusp of a Stateside crossover. Hoult landed X-Men: First Class, but the trip was to change Ameen’s life, too. Idris Elba to return for four more episodes of Luther Yardie review: "Idris Elba's directorial debut feels richly authentic" First look at the return of Luther in eerie new trailer View oEmbed on the source website Yardie, a gritty bullet opera set in mid-1970s Jamaica and 1980s London, gives Ameen his first starring film role since he debuted in Kidulthood in 2006, which disappointingly led only to a loop of guest roles in series like Silent Witness. His trajectory through The Bill was more promising: he graduated from playing a victim in 2002 to a criminal in 2004, then PC Lewis Hardy, a regular until 2007. Now he’s back on the wrong side of the law in Yardie, and the film, in cinemas from 31st August, still feels like a career corrective, even if it meant changing continents to achieve it. His character, “D”, a pistol-packing drug mule and aspiring reggae MC, is sent from Kingston to London to deliver a kilo of cocaine, reuniting him with Yvonne (newcomer Shantol Jackson), mother of the…

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Yardie review: “Idris Elba’s directorial debut feels richly authentic”
type: item
date: 2018-08-20T10:07:12.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Movies
subject: News
subject: Review
description: The actor adapts Victor Headley’s novel into a sure-fire hit that investigates ethnic and identity-based struggle
encoded: ★★★★ Like many schoolboys of my generation, I remember passing around paperback copies of the pseudonymous Richard Allen’s 70s pulp novels about predominantly white British youth tribes (Skinhead, Boot Boys, Glam). Had I been younger in the early 90s I might have caught the similar cultural fire ignited by their unofficial Jamaican successor, Yardie by Victor Headley. His debut novel was a self-starting sensation on publication through a small press in 1992, a snapshot of the Caribbean diaspora in London built around guns, drugs and internecine violence, and told in unvarnished, phonetic patois that took some getting used to. Selling tens of thousands of copies but not necessarily through bookshops (it was as likely to change hands in clothing stores or Afro-Caribbean outlets, and broadsheet reviews were almost non-existent), its portrayal of street life in Brixton in southwest London was raw and specific. View oEmbed on the source website The location shifts north to Hackney for its belated film adaptation, as that’s where debuting writer-director Idris Elba grew up, and it’s he who had the pulling power to finally get Yardie to the screen. His stock as an actor and personality has never been higher, and he strikes at a time of deeper understanding for roots and identity. He’s also the one who – one gathers from the muscular marketing push – was able to get the film into the multiplexes and beyond its target audience of colour. But it’s a big ask when your protagonist is a vengeful drug dealer from Jamaica who arrives at Heathrow with a kilo of cocaine taped under his clothes (Yardie is Caribbean slang for criminal). Played with charisma to spare by North London-born Aml Ameen (The Maze Runner, Sense8), “D” is a Jamaican 20-year-old still haunted by the death of his non-violent older brother Jerry (Everaldo Creary, one of many naturalistic Jamaican actors in the cast). “D”, which is short for Dennis, is deliberately softened from the page by writers Martin Stellman…

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Meet Endeavour writer Russell Lewis: a real man of mystery
type: item
date: 2018-08-10T11:37:29.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Detective Endeavour Morse has secrets – but not nearly as many as the man who writes him
encoded: I am due to be met off the train at Oxford by Russell Lewis, the man who devised ITV’s Inspector Morse prequel Endeavour and who has single-handedly written every one of the 17 two-hour episodes since its 2012 launch, plus six in the new, fifth series. Lewis mischievously uses an image of Patrick Magee in A Clockwork Orange as his Twitter avatar, so in order to identify him at the station, I searched for him on Google Images. There are no photos of him in the public domain, except the screen-grab I finally track down on a site called Movie Dude where, unhelpfully, he’s playing a character who’s seven years old. Thankfully, he recognises me and sidles up on the concourse using a greeting familiar to fans of From Russia with Love: “Excuse me, can I borrow a match?” I expected a tweedy Oxford-don type with leather elbow patches, but Lewis looks more like a hill-walking A&R man, a gravel-voiced 54-year-old in a North Face waterproof with the hairstyle of a young Ted Bovis. Meet the cast of Endeavour series five Endeavour fans think Shaun Evans is becoming more like John Thaw’s Morse in series five Endeavour will return for a sixth series, but some cast members won’t be back He leads me to the famous, neo-gothic Randolph Hotel and a pint of “Oxford Blue” in the Morse Bar. Actually, we have coffee, observed by framed photos of detective inspectors Lewis and Hathaway, Inspector Morse creator Colin Dexter (who died last March just as filming on Endeavour’s fifth series began) and Morse himself in a hospital bed in a 1998 episode. The non-fictional Lewis and I will spend the next two days on Endeavour’s set being queried or moved on by actual security guards as – to an extent by his own design – very few people on the crew know that this is the chap who writes it. Lewis speaks in the clipped aphorisms he gives to Roger Allam’s character, DI Thursday, as if he too came of age during the war (“Got to play the ball where it lies… Revenge is a dish best served cold”). He’s garru…

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What We Started review: "a decent, comprehensive account of dance music's evolution"
type: item
date: 2018-07-18T12:00:36.000Z
creator: Andrew Collins
subject: Documentaries
subject: Movies
subject: News
subject: TV
subject: Review
description: Carl Cox, Martin Garrix and a who's who of dance-music doyens provide chapter and verse on the history of EDM
encoded: ★★★ A documentary about dance music feels like a contradiction in terms; to analyse what is an intuitive, primal, physical activity risks robbing its essence. That said, the form’s history is as colourful and politically charged as the well-worn, hoary old saga of rock, and co-directors Bert Marcus and Cyrus Saidi give a decent, comprehensive and star-witness-studded account of its evolution, from sexually liberating New York disco to the more consumer-led EDM (electronic dance music) of today. View oEmbed on the source website Footage of 50-something Carl Cox working a crowd over a ten-hour all-nighter in Ibiza is contrasted with laptop-enabled Martin Garrix, the Dutch bedroom whizz who was catapulted to the world stage while still in his teens. What We Started pays respect to pioneers Paul Oakenfold, Louie Vega and Pete Tong, and teases old-school opprobrium from them as they accuse today’s “superstar DJs” of lacking their hard-won turntable skills in a USB-stick age. Does the technology matter? The jury’s out in what is a two-sided account. But the grandads certainly have better war stories to tell. Available on Netflix now

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